Strange or obtuse; a stinging homophobic slur; a radical political rejection of normativity; a broad term encompassing every and any variation on sexual orientation and gender identity: the word 'queer' has a multifarious past and complicated present. This is just a fraction of it.

Tracing the word's movements are Kathy Tu and Tobin Low from Nancypodcast, Eric Marcus from Making Gay History, and historian and author Amy Sueyoshi, with cameo appearances from Katie Mingle from 99% Invisible, Katie Herzog from The Stranger, and Jonathan Van Ness from Queer Eye.

Content note: this episodes contains discussions of sexuality and sexual acts, as well as some problematic terms.

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS:

Nancy and Making Gay History are two of the podcasts appearing at the Big Queer Pod Fest in NYC on Saturday 16 June.

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CREDITS:

Eric Marcus is the host of the podcast Making Gay History. The book of the same name, an oral history of 45 years of the struggle for equal rights for gay and lesbian people, is being reissued this month.

Amy Sueyoshi is the interim dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. Her latest book is Discriminating Sex, about sexuality, gender experimentation, and the Asian American experience in San Francisco in the 1890s.

The music is all by Martin Austwick, who writes and sings songs as Pale Bird.

This episode was produced by me and Matt Collette. Thanks to Colin Anderson at Earwolf, Caroline Crampton, Dan Hall, Dave Pickering, Phoebe Judge, Eleanor McDowall, and Gerard Koskovich and Nalini Elias at the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco.